A great extract from a mini book I found online, if it interests you let me know and I will send you the whole thing. It is about how diet is responsible for many of the afflictions of society, and for most of the diseases society experiences in modern times. During the last 50 years, quantity has been a much bigger theme than quality when it comes to diet and nutrition. We’ve been told that if we want to lose weight, we need to eat fewer calories and exercise more. We’ve also been told we need to eat less fat by most mainstream health organizations like the American Heart Association. More recently, some researchers and health experts have suggested that it’s not fat that is the problem, but carbohydrates, and that for optimal health we should follow a low carbohydrate diet. These recommendations are based on the mistaken idea that the key factor determining our health is either the overall quantity of food we eat, or the quantity of macronutrients like fat and carbohydrate that the food contains. For example, the low-fat crowd will tell you that eating too much fat—especially of the saturated variety—will make you fat and give you a heart attack. Yet there are many examples of traditional cultures with relatively high fat intakes, and low incidence of obesity and chronic, inflammatory disease. This is true of the Masai tribe in Africa, who get about 60-70 percent of calories from fat (almost entirely from meat, milk or blood) yet are remarkably lean, fit and healthy. And what about the modern French, who have the lowest rate of heart disease of any industrialized country in the world—despite the highest intake of saturated fat? The low-carb crowd is very much aware of these statistics, which are often used in defense of low-carb diets as the best choice. Tell that to the Kitavans in Melanesia, who get about 70 percent of calories from carbohydrate and, like the Masai, are almost entirely free of obesity, heart disease and other chronic, degenerative diseases that are so common in industrialized societies. We’ve observed a similar absence of modern diseases in the Kuna indians in Panama and the traditional Okinawans of Japan, two other healthy indigenous populations that got about 65 percent of calories from carbohydrate. What about the overall quantity of food we eat? We’ve known for some time that “counting calories”—purposely eating less—is not a very effective weight loss strategy, especially over the long term. More than 85 percent of people who count calories not only eventually gain back the weight they lost, they gain back even more weight. This leads to a vicious cycle of yo-yo dieting that I’m sure many of you are more familiar with than you’d like to be.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 23:36:41 +0000
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